Pew actually measured this too, and while there's some conversion it's mostly just a decline in religiosity generally:

Nicolai von Neudeck 🇺🇦@vonneudeck.com · 7h ago

A lot of people in Latin America have converted to evangelical prosperity gospel. So we don’t know if there are fewer religious people than before from just looking at the numbers of Catholics

It remains highly ironic that Huntington thought religion would be the dividing line of the 21st century when religiosity has been in decline in most regions of the world (Europe, the Americas, Southeast and East Asia, Oceania) since the year 2000.

Pride Ott 🦦 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️@hikoukihikouki9.bsky.social · 12h ago

it is funny how conservatives in Europe have to do the whole "western christian *values*" song and dance because they know nobody goes to church there lmao

This is exactly right, the Western Hemisphere has more in common than not and there is absolutely no way American (in the broader sense) states can match the common markets of megastates like India and China without intense hemispheric coordination.

Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 13h ago

Or accepting that our firms will be limited to a pool 300 some million USians for both duty free labor & customers, rather than close to a billion Americans, and will thus suffer a competitive disadvantage against our more populous economic rivals

This, stamps, and currency should absolutely be black-and-white constitutional amendments. Obviously irrelevant if Congress and the courts won't enforce it, but this is one way you prevent cults of personality from forming.

Christo Silvia@christosilvia.bsky.social · 14h ago

Candidly I would support getting rid of all of the person named ships

Anyways, can’t wait for another round of “ThIs HaS NoThInG tO dO WiTh RaCe, ItS SiMpLy AbOuT MeRiT” from the worst people you know

Yeah, there's a lot of debt but what matters is the fact that they have eroded the fiscal space via political actions and have shown they have no plan to actually deal with fundamental real economic - i.e. capital stock -- rather than monetary problems.

Add that this is all happening in the background of a botched war with serious real economic consequences that the sovereign seems to be too senile to respond to.

The biggest byproduct of the Columbian exchange had nothing to do with Europe *or* the Americas, and everything to do with the runaway population explosion in East Asia because of the introduction of the sweet potato.

Noah Brand@noahbrand.bsky.social · 19h ago

Historically, Native Americans responded to the introduction of horses the way Europeans and Asians responded to the introduction of potatoes: "These are fucking GREAT and they're ours now." The Columbian Exchange wasn't JUST rape and smallpox (and possibly syphilis).

Majority is an understatement, 88% of global oil and gas reserves are controlled by OPEC and state-owned oil companies. The three largest oil companies on Earth by revenue are Saudi Aramco, China Petroleum, and PetroChina.

Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 18h ago

The majority of fossil fuels are extracted by state owned firms

This right-wing complaint about US military ops since, well, Vietnam (?) has mainly been about their belief that liberals and lawyers are holding America back from unleashing its military might and (with magic) winning every war we've engaged in. It's the same thing over and over and over.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 19h ago

Rep. Rich McCormick on Iran: "We should've taken the gloves right from the beginning and hammered them. You have to make it absolutely miserable on their populace."

i maintain that a major reason all our elites went insane is that since 2000, the number of US households that can afford elite college has doubled, while the number of such slots has stayed basically flat

BeijingPalmer@beijingpalmer.bsky.social · yesterday

an interesting structure of the college admissions scandal is that it was *not* about admission to first-tier institutions - which are more reputationally sensitive - but second-or-third-tier ones.

I'm more impressed by the line "if every female doctor disappeared tomorrow, the world would be exactly the same." 39% of active licensed physicians in the US are women! They make up 55% of medical school enrollment! This would gut the healthcare industry! We do not live in 1975 anymore!

Starfire’s Deranged Neocon Foreign Policy Podcast@irhottakes.bsky.social · 22h ago

This seems like a more dickish way of saying if women are not going to not have jobs, they will have jobs. And yeah. It’s technically true your options are broodmare, house slave, sex object, or career woman. But that last one actually rules, so sorry, buddy.

The only reason this wouldn't work is that you will get dozens of human interest stories with headlines like "he deciphered Linear A. Harvard rejected him anyway". They will of course be written by journalists with last names like "Vanderbilt" who think that last name is part of being well-rounded.

Cameron D. Campbell 康文林@camerondcampbell.blog · yesterday

Personally I'd like to see focused lotteries where there is a fixed cutoff on a standardized exam that represents the minimum level of preparation required to succeed, and then pick from people who meet the threshold by lottery. Natasha Warikoo has written about this. 1/2

this reminds me of the general consensus among educators in China that the gaokao (universal college entrance exam) is a highly problematic system that is also better than any other option

Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · yesterday

Let me be exceptionally clear: the reason why minorities are consistently better served, across the world, by central and anonymous exams is because they are better served by a fair assessment process, and not one in which they are the victim of either witting or unwitting bias.

In fairness, so were Egypt and Syria in 1973 (at least for the time). All of Israel's early wars were fought against sophisticated states armed by the Soviet Union. They also haven't done that sort of thing in decades, though, and Turkey is a step up from Hafez al-Assad's Syria.

Starfire’s Deranged Neocon Foreign Policy Podcast@irhottakes.bsky.social · 24h ago

Israel knows Turkey is an actual modern state, right? Like, it's not just another impoverished pile of rubble you can kick around. They have a robot aircraft carrier, true story.

The same as the Selzer poll that had Harris up by 3 points in Iowa, outliers exist and polling has been broken since the mid-2010s. It's likely to be a D+6 to D+8 environment in November, which will be a solid wave year but nothing historically out of the ordinary.

Honestly incredible time in this field when the President can say stuff to press like "North Korea has 57 nuclear weapons" and we still have to do tremendous amounts of work to figure out if that was a TS disclosure based on good (or bad) info he was briefed (or fed) or just something he made up

Mackenzie Knight-Boyle@mknight.bsky.social · 2d ago

WRITE THAT DOWN WRITE THAT DOWN

People east of the International Date Line may not realize this but South Korea is pretty much the US's strongest ally and if it can happen to them it can most certainly happen to you.

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 2d ago

“.. Trump’s move ‘resonates not just in Korea but across the entire Indo-Pacific because everyone’s wondering whether or not their relationship with the United States is as unstable as the Koreans.’” @politico.com www.politico.com/news/2026/08...

There's a (careful) point to be made here about one of the earliest countries to come out of decolonization pulling the ladder up behind itself as far as sovereignty goes. Indonesia is the same way. It's quite unpleasant.

open all borders. stop having them be closed 🇺🇦🇱🇹🇵🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿@dov.bsky.social · 2d ago

The solidarity debt actually flows the other way considering how eagerly it trades with Russia too lol

The funniest thing here the other day was a Hindutva troll accusing Balts of insufficient solidarity with other colonised peoples because of a post I made once about a book critical of the BJP. Look idk how to tell you this but you are a nuclear power now

I did not have the PLA Navy playing my "Littoral Commander Indo-Pacific" #wargame on one of their ships on my bingo card for 2026. Absolutely wild. 🎲 #wargaming

Seeing Mitter's name here was legitimately wild, since I've used his work before (and I am not a medievalist). I suppose it's who CNN could get on the phone on short notice...

aohsu@aohsusometimesy.bsky.social · yesterday

Kirby and Mitter are not medievalists

I like that the authorities CNN has “fact checking” “yes the Tang Dynasty existed” are two Harvard professors, the CCP, and a random eighteen y.o. Beijinger.

Fascinating News 🇺🇸@fascinating-us.bsky.social · 2d ago

Why is one corner of China’s internet insisting a golden era never existed? https://fascinating.news/r/pa7S78VW

I think about the number of weirdo Chinese nationalists on Reddit I come across who rail angrily against any suggestion the Tang were not the purest Hans who ever Hanned, and this trio of paragraphs would probably give them a collective aneurysm.

aohsu@aohsusometimesy.bsky.social · 2d ago

I like that the authorities CNN has “fact checking” “yes the Tang Dynasty existed” are two Harvard professors, the CCP, and a random eighteen y.o. Beijinger.

Correct, it's why the Kazakh famine is widely seen as a genocide (it stopped Kazakhstan being a -stan for Kazakhs until the 1990s, the majority ethnicity post-1933 was Russians) even by historians who are unconvinced the Holodomor fits the legal definition.

Ed@ed3d.net · 2d ago

you know, the OP's right, similar famines did happen in other regions! In Kazakhstan the majority of people who died were ethnic Kazakhs and ethnic minorities (so, non-Russians) and uh wait, how is this supposed to make things better, how is this supposed to be exculpatory

To some extent this has been the US for the last 35 years. After the Soviet collapse, there was a great deal of soul-searching ("what next?") but nothing really stuck. The most optimistic ideology was arguably Silicon Valley's. It's a culture of ennui.

Martin #509@martin509.bsky.social · yesterday

On basically every side of the political spectrum except I guess the progressive left, there is this conception of the US that right now things are in the "last call before the bar closes" phase, and it is fucking baffling how resigned most people are to that conclusion!

It should not be forgotten that even after his apocalyptic defeat in 1932, Hoover remained probably the most powerful man in the Republican Party for decades thereafter and "Hooverism" as a political ideology did not die. Trump doesn't have that kind of time, he's too old, but Trumpism might.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux@bretdevereaux.bsky.social · yesterday

That said, precisely because the imperial court is so deeply, violently dysfunctional, I remain pretty confident that this authoritarian attempt is going to fail and probably fail quite badly. Trump-as-Hoover remains, I think, my model outcome, though other much, much worse options are possible.

The thing you learn in a basic World Religion class is that making people read holy books without a lot of context and training is often not a worthwhile endeavor and honestly not reading them isn't a deal breaker for most religions Protestants are just Like That

American racism is highly *visible*. That is, white supremacy is obvious. Jim Crow was about visible distinctions - Arabs and Hispanics who "looked white" often avoided it. The same cannot be said of anti-Slav racism in Western Europe or anti-Bengali racism in India.

William B. Fuckley@opinionhaver.bsky.social · 3d ago

eg: while the history of American racism should absolutely be taught as part of any well-rounded curriculum, it actually is important to put it some kind of relative context, because I think a lot of people come away with the impression that racism is entirely an American phenomenon

Musk isn't an Afrikaner!

The Hell Curve@thehellcurve.bsky.social · 2d ago

[cupping ear] What the Boer?